AMD Radeon HD 7790 Review Feat. Sapphire: The First Desktop Sea Islands
by Ryan Smith on March 22, 2013 12:01 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- AMD
- Sapphire
- GCN
- Radeon HD 7000
The Test
For today’s review we will be using the latest rendition of our game benchmark suite, first introduced in our review of the GeForce GTX Titan. We still expect to add another 1-2 games to this suite in April after the last of the major Spring game releases hit next week. As a reminder, our 2013 benchmark suite is much more 1080p centric on the low-end, as 1080p sales have eclipsed even cheaper, lower resolution monitors. As AMD is promoting the 7790 as an entry-level 1080p card anyhow, this ends up working well.
On the driver side of things we are using AMD’s 12.101.2 press drivers for the 7790, and their Catalyst 13.2 beta 7 drivers for the rest of our AMD cards. For our NVIDIA cards we are using 314.21.
Unfortunately we only had a very short period of time to spend with this card due to AMD’s launch schedule conflicting with NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference this week. As a result while we’ve been able to put together our usual analysis and data collections, we’ve only been able to compare it to around half a dozen other cards – the relevant AMD and NVIDIA cards above and below the 7790, and for a historical perspective we’ve thrown in the Radeon HD 6870.
Similarly, because of a short period of time to write this article our performnace commentary will be lighter than usual, so our apologies on that. But the fact of the matter is that the 7790 results will speak for themselves as we’ll see in our charts. Against AMD’s lineup the 7790 is comfortably in between the 7770 and 7850, offering 130% of the former and 84% of the latter on average. While against NVIDIA’s lineup the 7790 is 11% faster than the GTX 650 Ti, beating the 650 Ti – sometimes by quite a bit – in everything but Battlefield 3. The question, as is often the case, is not performance but price.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-3960X @ 4.3GHz |
| Motherboard: | EVGA X79 SLI |
| Power Supply: | Antec True Power Quattro 1200 |
| Hard Disk: | Samsung 470 (256GB) |
| Memory: | G.Skill Ripjaws DDR3-1867 4 x 4GB (8-10-9-26) |
| Case: | Thermaltake Spedo Advance |
| Monitor: | Samsung 305T |
| Video Cards: |
AMD Radeon HD 7850 AMD Radeon HD 7790 AMD Radeon HD 7770 AMD Radeon HD 6870 Sapphire HD 7790 Dual-X OC NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti |
| Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA ForceWare 314.21 AMD 12.101.2 7790 Press Beta AMD Catalyst 13.2 Beta 7 |
| OS: | Windows 8 Pro |
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GivMe1 - Friday, March 22, 2013 - link
128bit interface is going to hurt high res textures...CeriseCogburn - Sunday, March 24, 2013 - link
Oh no it won't ! this is amd man! nothing hurts when it's amd ! amd yes it can !Quizzical - Friday, March 22, 2013 - link
Your chart shows Radeon HD 6870 FP64 performance as N/A. I think it's 1/20 of FP32 performance, but I'm not sure of that. It definitely can do FP64, as otherwise, it wouldn't be able to claim OpenGL 4 compliance.MrSpadge - Friday, March 22, 2013 - link
No, it doesn't have any HARDWARE FP64 capabilities. It's always possible to emulate this at slow performance via software, though.Quizzical - Friday, March 22, 2013 - link
It's basically the same as what the 7770, 7790, and 7850 do, but they're not listed as N/A. The relevant question isn't whether you can do it more slowly, but how much more slowly.MrSpadge - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
No, it's not the same, the GCN cards have hardware FP64 capabilities.Ryan Smith - Friday, March 22, 2013 - link
Let's be clear here. 85W is not the TDP. The TDP is higher (likely on the order of 110W or so). However AMD chooses not to publish the TDP for these lower end cards, and instead the TBP.alwayssts - Friday, March 22, 2013 - link
Yeah, I figure ~85 TBP/105w TDP because that would be smack between 7770/7850 as well as having 20% headroom (which also allows another product to have their TBP between there and 7850's max TDP with it's max tdp above it within 150w....ie ~120-125/150w). IIRC, 80w is the powertune max (TDP) of 7770, 130w for 7850. 85w is the stock operation (TBP) of 7790.I really, really dislike how convoluted this power game has become...can you tell?!
First it was max power. Then it was nvidia stating typical power (so products were within pci-e spec) with AMD still quoting max, which made them look bad. Then we get this 'awesome' product segmentation with 7000 having TBP and max powertune TDPs to separate them, while nvidia quotes TBP and hides the fact the TDP limits for their products exist unless you deduce them from the percentage you can up the boost power.
AAAAaaaarrrrrghhhhh. I miss when the product you had could do what you wanted it to, ie before software voltage control and multiple states, as for products like this it gives the user less control and the companies a ton to create segmentation. Low-end stock products may have been less-than-stellar back in the day, but with determination you could get something out of it without some marketing stating it should fit x niche so give it y max tdp so it doesn't interfere with the market of z product.
CeriseCogburn - Friday, March 22, 2013 - link
Maybe so you couldn't blow the crap out of it then return it for another one, then another one, as "you saved money" and caused everyone else to pay 25% more since you overclock freaks would blow them up, then LIE and get the freebie replacement, over and over again.Maybe they got sick of dealing with scam artist liars... maybe they aren't evil but the end user IS.
Spunjji - Friday, March 22, 2013 - link
Why would the design power be higher than the total board power? :/ You're correct that the figure they're quoting isn't TDP but then you just went and made up a number.Here's some actual power consumption measurements of a 7770:
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/HIS/HD_7770_iCo...
So using Ananad's figures to extrapolate you can expect this thing to be ~90W max, usually lower than that at peak, right about where AMD put it.